A4
THE ASTORIAN • SATuRdAy, FEbRuARy 27, 2021
OPINION
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
DERRICK DePLEDGE
Editor
Founded in 1873
SHANNON ARLINT
Circulation Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN
Production Manager
CARL EARL
Systems Manager
WRITER’S NOTEBOOK
Charting the grid’s future
W
hen Gretchen Bakke was
growing up, Bumble Bee
Seafoods’ cannery was
closing, the spotted owl was deliver-
ing a possible death knell to the timber
industry and Astoria was gritty. The
lights also went out all the time.
That spurred the anthropologist to
explore what happens when power sys-
tems fail and how peo-
ple react.
Bakke’s book,
“The Grid: The Fray-
ing Wires Between
Americans and Our
Energy Future,” came
out in 2016. Micro-
JONATHAN
soft founder Bill Gates
WILLIAMS
listed it as one of his
favorites that year. Her
work has seen a resurgence after the
extreme power outages that plagued
Texas, including interviews with the
The Washington Post and National
Public Radio.
Bakke spoke to The Astorian from
her home in Berlin, Germany, about
the fires and ice storms across Ore-
gon, similarities between the power
grid and broadband internet access and
what can be done to combat climate
disasters.
The Astoria High School graduate
went on to earn her doctoral degree in
cultural anthropology at the University
of Chicago and now teaches at Hum-
boldt University in Berlin.
Her research for her book began in
Oregon with the Great Coastal Gale
of 2007, which rocked much of the
North Coast and left the region without
power for nearly a week.
“I was always trying to bring Ore-
gon to the fore in part because people
at a global, at a national level, people
don’t pay that much attention to what’s
happening in Oregon,” Bakke said.
She pointed out that the power out-
ages from the ice storms were the most
expensive in the state’s history. Bak-
ke’s mother, who still lives in Astoria,
told her a transformer blew outside her
house.
Bakke noted the disparities between
Texas’s storm and Oregon’s. In Ore-
gon, people were still posting pic-
tures on Instagram and Facebook of
Gretchen Bakke
Katie Frankowicz/The Astorian
Ice caused trees to snap and downed power lines in Astoria during a storm earlier this month.
branches covered with ice even though
their power was out, she said. In Texas,
people boiled snow for water.
One similarity the states do share,
Bakke says, is the number of power
outages they experience each year.
Texas has the most in the U.S. Oregon
comes in second.
Bakke said what made the outages
in Texas so catastrophic was the kind
of weather the Lone Star State expe-
rienced. It wasn’t prepared, “ … Not
just the electrical infrastructure but the
insulation in peoples’ homes, the tires
on peoples’ cars, all of these things,
was just not prepared for that level of
cold,” she said.
She said the state is a special case
since it’s separated from the rest of the
U.S. through its own grid and has a
difficult time bringing in extra power.
In a review of her book for The Wall
Street Journal, R. Tyler Priest writes
aptly about the unappreciated signif-
icance of electricity: “Without elec-
tricity, life shuts down. Buildings and
streets go dark. Computers and smart-
phones die. Televisions flicker off.
Food perishes in refrigerators. Even
money, which is stored, traded and
monitored electronically, becomes
inaccessible.”
One way to mitigate power outages
is through hardening the grid. Upgrad-
ing transformers, moving power lines
underground, creating power redun-
dancies, trimming trees, which the
North Coast has a surplus of, all help.
“The biggest cause of power outages
in the United States is trees and vines,”
Bakke said.
About a decade ago, there used to
be just one feeder line to coastal com-
munities until a branch fell on that and
they had to fix it, Bakke said. When
they did, they doubled the line at Clats-
kanie, creating a redundancy in case
one of the lines went down.
Bakke sees similarities between
the power grid and rural broadband
issues experienced throughout Clat-
sop County. Like electricity, broadband
sometimes has to be government man-
dated and funded for areas to get it.
As for how people should pre-
pare for more frequent climate-related
disasters, as is predicted by scientists,
Bakke thinks it should not all be on the
individual.
“ … There’s something about this
ONE WAy TO MITIGATE POWER OuTAGES IS THROuGH HARdENING THE
GRId. uPGRAdING TRANSFORMERS, MOVING POWER LINES uNdERGROuNd,
CREATING POWER REduNdANCIES, TRIMMING TREES, WHICH THE NORTH
COAST HAS A SuRPLuS OF, ALL HELP. ‘THE bIGGEST CAuSE OF POWER
OuTAGES IN THE uNITEd STATES IS TREES ANd VINES,’ bAKKE SAId.
idea right now, like somehow individ-
ual people are responsible for doing
what needs to be done to achieve car-
bon neutrality, and this absolutely
can’t happen if it’s just us like making
choices,” Bakke said.
She explained that in Europe, the
Green Deal aims to reach carbon neu-
trality across the continent by 2050.
“What I like about that is that it
really crosses scale so you could say
about your own life, like how can I be
carbon neutral, and then your electric
company can say, OK about their com-
pany, how they can be carbon neutral,
so you have at all different scales peo-
ple tackling the problem as it relates to
their particular circumstances or their
particular life,” Bakke said.
Jonathan Williams is the associate
editor of The Astorian.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Severance tax
Best word
s the Oregon Legislature consid-
ers restructuring the tax on harvest-
ing timber, two overarching goals should
dominate the discussion: Mitigating cli-
mate change and providing jobs for rural
Oregonians.
Only a severance tax for harvest-
ing trees on private land would signifi-
cantly increase the funds that counties now
receive from logging on state land, and
help accomplish both of these goals.
With an increase in funding for coun-
ties coming from a severance tax, the Ore-
gon Department of Forestry will no lon-
ger need to sell timber on our state land
to the highest bidder. All clearcutting of
state land could end leaving the ODF to
focus on forest restoration and wildfire
mitigation.
ODF’s eliminating clearcuts, clean-
ing up forest debris and restoring forests
would help mitigate climate change, while
providing abundant employment oppor-
tunities for workers in rural communi-
ties who are increasingly seeing their jobs
eliminated by industry automation.
Funding for ODF could come from
measures like eliminating the Oregon For-
est Resources Institute, ending subsidizes
for the Oregon State University College of
Forestry, and allowing some selective log-
ging on state land as part of the restoration
of forests.
Tax breaks could be offered to tim-
ber corporations for doing selective log-
ging instead of clearcutting, brush clear-
ing by hand instead of aerial spraying and
science-based forest restoration instead of
simply planting trees in rows.
These measures could help accom-
plish climate change and rural employ-
ment goals. Best of all, those corporations
would be paying their fair share of taxes
again, like they did prior to the 1990s.
ROGER DORBAND
Astoria
D
A
isgusting is the best word to describe
the ugly hatefulness of Erhard Gross’
(Feb. 20) letter, “Comparisons,” compar-
ing former President Donald Trump to
Adolf Hitler, one of history’s worst killers
of humanity.
It’s perplexing The Astorian would print
such an evil diatribe, written as though the
comparison had a factual basis. To print
such unfounded hateful diatribe is unwor-
thy of a newspaper that prides itself on its
ethics and professionalism.
With half the country and 43% of Clat-
sop County voters voting for Trump, it’s
amazing The Astorian would intentionally
offend so many readers and advertisers
by the newspaper’s decision to print such
unfounded evil vitriol.
DON HASKELL
Astoria
Global access
e all want the coronavirus pandemic
to be over, but do we know the most
effective, fastest way to do that? We have
to increase global access to safe and effec-
tive vaccines.
Research from Northeastern University
shows that vaccine hoarding by wealthy
nations and inequitable vaccine distribu-
tion could lead to twice as many COVID-
19 deaths worldwide. That’s why it’s so
important that Sen. Ron Wyden, Sen. Jeff
Merkley and Congresswoman Suzanne
Bonamici support global efforts to distrib-
ute vaccines, and invest at least $20 billion
in fighting COVID-19 globally, including
funding for proven health programs like
The Global Fund and Coalition for Epi-
demic Preparedness Innovations.
Regardless of whether you live in Bea-
verton or Botswana, we’re all in this fight
together. In order to end this pandemic, the
U.S. must help ensure that first respond-
W
ers and at-risk populations have prior-
ity access to vaccines, regardless of where
they live.
Promoting global access to COVID-19
vaccines isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s
the smart thing to do. If we don’t fight the
virus everywhere, variants will continue
to evolve and spread around the world.
It’s the only way to end this pandemic as
quickly as possible, here in the U.S. and
around the world.
As Congress considers the next
COVID-19 emergency relief bill, I encour-
age Sens. Wyden and Merkley and Rep.
Bonamici to support at least $20 billion in
global COVID-19 resources that are essen-
tial to reopening the global economy and
ending this pandemic everywhere.
MICHAEL KALKOFEN
Beaverton